Today I want to develop out the idea a little further that the pressures (resource and otherwise) we’re feeling might make it difficult to continue spending this energy at the same levels. And then I want to take it further and examine some of the reasons why the MOOC format intrigues me on its own terms.

Most academic libraries are trying to do more with less, whether less means human resources or other types of resources.

This has been true for a long time, but in many ways it’s more a more intense problem now. Whether we’re dealing with layoffs and furloughs, or a student body that’s exploding in size without a similar explosion in resources, we’re all dealing with this situation, I think.

Here’s our situation here. This:

Next year’s higher ed state funding levels in Oregon

Plus this:

(Especially note the growth rate during the period after the economy tanked)

To put it in specific library-instruction terms, WR 121 is our FYC class (plus also the only course required of all OSU students). That’s where we try to meet every student with library instruction. In the almost-10 years I’ve been here, the number of sections of WR 121 per term has grown from about 25 to about 40, give or take a few. At the same time, we have concentrated teaching (and engagement initiatives) in a department with 7 librarians, who also do other things that aren’t teaching classes. So that math is obvious, WR 121 hasn’t yet, but could easily go from one thing we do into the only thing we can do.

There is new cool stuff we teaching librarians want to do, and it’s usually resource-intensive and won’t reach all of our students.

Meaningful assessment can be incredibly resource-intensive. So many people I know are interested in pursuing complex projects like lesson study, or ethnography,or rubric development, but concerned about the resource investment they require.

I am a college graduate, having finished my last undergraduate finals the previous week. I intend to continue learning, to avoid falling into the malaise that often grips people in the years after they “finish” their education – if we accept that education can really be finished.

This person takes a more results-oriented approach to the same kind lifelong learning message, thinking about how to fit this kind of learning in throughout her professional career: “If I can learn the theory from taking MOOCs and apply what I’ve learned through experience, I see no reason why I cannot continue this cycle with programs relevant at the various stages in my career.”

Or there’s this take – which recognizes a lot of the pedagogical limitations in existing courses, but says we shouldn’t be so quick to judge – “Because as much as we need to be proponents of engagement and intentional educational practices, we also need to be proponents of lifelong learning and continued education.”

Knowing how to go out and get trained on new things when you see you have gaps is an important skill, and one that we’re increasingly expected to do independently.

So here’s where I go beyond the idea that some of the things we’re doing are hard to sustain and into areas where I think the MOOC format (again, don’t care what we call it) has some features worth exploring for their own sake.

Let’s go back to the stories research I mentioned in part 1. There were situations where our subjects were more optimistic about the one-shot, and those situations are also worth considering. The most striking category here were classes (usually upper-division) in subjects where there was some research tool or information source that is absolutely essential for professionals in the field. Librarians teaching one-shots in that context reported that students were interested, engaged and immediately able to understand the connection between the tool and their goals.

This is one reason why I frequently think the best one-shots (or drop-in workshops, for where that’s relevant) are more similar to professional training than they are to classroom teaching. One thing that struck be about those stories were the extent to which students in those classes were doing the same type of learning they would likely need to do to stay informed in current when they left school, on the job. When the software they were learning in this library session changed, or is replaced by something else, they’ll be in a workshop or seminar or webinar to learn it on the job.

And I think we all feel that we’re all expected to be more independent with our professional development training. With the increased availability of webinars, webcasts, even YouTube videos – we’re expected (and we expect ourselves) to learn how to get the information we need to be successful for ourselves.

But here’s the thing – I think this is particularly important for our students today. When I was in college, I went to a school with a large and successful undergraduate business curriculum so even though I wasn’t expecting to go into a traditional job right away, I knew lots of people who were and I know what normal expectations looked like then. They would talk about getting internships and practica, so they could get an entry level, corporate job where they would 1. get trained on the tools and processes they needed in that specific environment and 2. get their eventual M.B.A. paid for. The school would talk to students about understanding the theory and concepts of the workplace, more than individual software packages and tools because “they’ll train you on that when you get there.”

Now, I’m not saying that my friends on that track believed that they would work at the same place forever, but I can tell you that the level of investment a company was known for putting into its employees was definitely something they considered when they took a job. Now, I’m not sure that would be a very sensible way to think about it, because I think investing in employees is getting rarer and rarer. That’s probably not even a controversial statement – that bastion of radicalism, The Wall Street Journal, agrees with me:

To get America’s job engine revving again, companies need to stop pinning so much of the blame on our nation’s education system. They need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice.

Or at least, you know, one WSJ blogger agrees with me.

I’ll tell you when i see articles and presentations explaining how “these kids today don’t want the same job for 5 years, they’ll jump ship in a heartbeat” — my first reaction is to think that these kids today are willing to show exactly the same loyalty as they’re being shown, which seems like a pretty rational response to me.

So, in a context where you can’t rely on your employer to train you, to orient you, to help you stay current and informed – then the person who is going to be successful and powerful is going to be the person who knows how to do those things for themselves. If MOOCs are going to be part of the professional development landscape, and even if that specific format is not, I think that it makes sense to start thinking about how we can help students learn to find those courses, those workshops and those webinars that will help them get ahead.

Other things about MOOCs that intrigue me when I think about them as an alternative to oneshots or tutorials

There’s also something specific about the MOOC format, at least as it exists now, that I think fits in here and provides another way to think about research instruction and the practice of research.

One dream I’ve always had is a dream of a college campus environment where peers helping peers, students helping students, is part of the culture. This has always seemed like a pipe dream, though, because most students don’t seem to consider research something that they would ask for help on, at least from anyone but their instructor — when they’re good at it they don’t think much of it, and don’t think it’s worth sharing, and when they’re inexperienced at it they don’t want anyone to know.

(Obligatory caveat – obviously not all students, etc. etc.)

But one thing I’ve noticed is that things like discussion forums, and other interactive online spaces are places where people go for help when they need it in the real world – and it’s frequently where they go with software or interface or tool-related questions. They don’t do it with our tools, though, and I think that’s a gap. Now MOOCs, as they exist now, aren’t great at the discussion forum part either, I think. In a fairly pointed critique of the pedagogy of MOOC’s, Ann Kirschner focuses on the lack of peer-to-peer learning,

If you believe the sage’s advice that we learn much from our teachers and colleagues but most of all from our students, MOOC’s will be far more effective when we are able to learn from one another.

Now, I suspect discussions in MOOCs are way too big for many people to feel comfortable in the forums, and that there are a lot of people like me who just haven’t felt the need to go there. The idea that there’s a culture where you have some responsibility to participate in discussions is clearly not universal. But still, the opportunity exists for students to help each other — and for the ones that do go to the forums, I would imagine help from peers happens more quickly and reliably than help from instructors.

This is why the idea of an institution creating and monitoring its own discussion spaces within the MOOC is so intriguing to me. Think about it, if you had a combination of students taking it (or parts of it) — some from classes where the professors didn’t want to give up class time for a research unit, some from programs that decide to require it, some go-getter (or scared) new students who want to give themselves the best chance to succeed, and maybe even some prospective students who are just. so. excited. to start — and then you created a discussion forum for those students to get together and discuss an then a few of them even ventured out into the larger forums and found people working on similar research from across the country and a few of the faculty members got in and participated and saw the kinds of questions their students had? Well, that seems like something worth trying for.

(And even if you didn’t have the capacity or desire to do any of that, you’d still have something more flexible and useful than a full-on process tutorial, and more efficient than the same content in 52 one-shots)

Employers we interviewed said college hires had more trouble with team communication strategies than with any other single aspect of the research process. Some employers explained that college hires simply overlooked the social capital team members, in particular, could bring to framing research questions and posing problems. Others said these new recruits thought of research as a task that was not conducive to collaboration. Instead, they simply wanted to “go to Point A and then march all alone to Point B.”

I think one-shots, at least the one-shots that are totally tied to a single assignments, create challenges when it comes to transfer — I think students have a hard time thinking about how to transfer the skills that help them meet the specific requirements of their COMM 100 class when they’re faced with different requirements, or even weirder, with non school expectations. I think we could do a lot more to build a culture of peer support for research. I’m intrigued by the possibility of a format that might, for some students at least, approach these same ideas in a different way.

But here’s what I’ve found – when you bring up the term, even if it is just to say, “I think this one specific thing is interesting about MOOCs,” what you’ll get is, “let me share My Opinion About MOOCs and not engage with that one thing or anything else you said at all.”

So why do I want to talk about them? Well, it comes down to an issue that has been a part of library instruction discourse since long before I became a librarian – the sharing issue. As in, we share so well in libraries, but it’s all about stuff, how can we share beyond our stuff? Also known as the reinventing the wheel issue in library instruction — we spend a lot of time reinventing wheels that have already been invented.

The thoughts I’m trying to make coherent on this one are these:

Teaching librarians have never gotten to where we want to be with sharing – instructional talent, resources or materials.

We’re not satisfied with one-shots, most of the time.

We all spend a lot of time teaching skills-level stuff (how to navigate tools, understand academic information workflows, how to work around bad interfaces) and there are students who need (or want) those skills.

Much of our assessment is basic and skills-based too, in our asynchronous tutorials and in our one-shot sessions.

Most academic libraries are trying to do more with less, whether less means human resources or other types of resources.

There is new cool stuff we teaching librarians want to do, and it’s usually resource-intensive and won’t reach all of our students.

Knowing how to go out and get trained on new things when you see you have gaps is an important skill, and one that we’re increasingly expected to do independently.

I’m going to start with the first four.

My big question is this – does the MOOC format which (as I’ve said) is not particularly radical or disruptive, offer an opportunity to librarians to think about teaching collaboratively, or sharing our teaching strength, in a new way?

I’m taking a MOOC right now – a refresher on statistics — and I’m definitely struck by how non-transformative the delivery is. We’re talking about talking head videos, broken up by multiple choice quizzes. There are labs which have you doing hands-on work with a particular piece of software. This is followed by a weekly assignment that’s just a more robust quiz that allows for freely written answers. The videos are short, high-quality and watchable, but if the professor is a “super-professor” I’m pretty sure it’s because of all of the other things he does to connect with and help students on the face-to-face campus than it is because he’s a superstar lecturer.

(Competent but not a superstar at the lecturing, is what I’m saying)

I suspect the difference between this class and a million and one other canned online courses that have existed in the world is found in the discussion forums. For me, though, the class hasn’t progressed to the point yet where I feel like I need to visit the forums. Everything so far is pretty straightforward and clear. Given the reasons people gave for starting it, I would guess that I am far from alone in that. The class does take the openness aspect of MOOC fairly seriously. The resources provided are all open, and while the professor did point us to a paywalled article from Science, the article is where it is. Most notably, the software being taught is open and widely available – a decision that I am certain was deliberate.

Anyway, the point is that nothing I’ve read about MOOCs suggests that this is an unusual experience – from the reasons I have for taking the course, to the structure and delivery of it, to the uneven participation on the forums — this all sounds about right.

I’ve never heard of a multi-institution MOOC, and I will admit to not going beyond cursory Googling to find one. I have seen evidence of non-college-related MOOC content, but I haven’t seen any examples of higher education institutions. collaborating to deliver a course. I don’t see any reason, however, why that wouldn’t work — and indeed — why it might not be better. Obviously, if you’re interested in replacing or replicating credit courses then that becomes more complicated, but that’s part of the beauty of library instruction. Most of us don’t do for-credit instruction, and even if we do, it’s only a fraction of what we do. Most of our teaching falls outside of university credit or tuition structures. We can be creative when we think about delivery, credentialing and cooperation. I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t share in this way (besides the ways it would be challenging).

So what if there were a topic per week, clearly marked so someone could do them all or pick and choose, with high- quality video lectures and related resources and assessments? The ability to take quizzes for assessment, or for self-regulation, would be built in. A resource page listing participating schools and pointing towards tutorials or handouts that outline local processes could be provided. Libraries could monitor local cohort discussion boards, host meet-ups of people taking the course, or just point faculty to the lectures, resources and quizzes for specific topics — their level of involvement could be whatever they could support.

Is this a crazy idea? It doesn’t need to be called a MOOC – it was just the discussion forum/ local cohort, shared resources aspects of the MOOC that made me think about it.

The plot does come from somewhere, though, and it starts with years of people asking me instruction librarians don’t, or can’t, share their stuff better.

Teaching librarians have never gotten to where we want to be with sharing – instructional talent, resources or materials.

I’ve written about this before. A lot. Most of our efforts about sharing to this point have focused on building and sharing asynchronous online teaching tools like tutorials — repositories like ANTS, databases like PRIMO or sharable tutorials like TILT.

While all of these efforts have been successful in different ways, none of them have taken the question of “why don’t we share more” question off the table. We have a long history of consortial involvement here in the Pacific Northwest, and since my first days as an instruction coordinator, the Alliance has been asking (in general, not asking me specifically) how we can extend that spirit of sharing to our public services, especially instruction.

Real sharing, where we don’t adapt, customize and tweak to make it look like we made it at home, will take a cultural shift — but there are a couple of reasons why I think that it might be a good time to think about it in a new way. First, there are some real reasons why the tutorial/ learning module repository is problematic. We’re not the only ones to find it so – and we’re not the only ones who have tried it. Hannah and I outlined a lot of the reasons why in our paper, but tl;dr – cultural, technological and individual workflow issues all work against the idea of a robust, user-populated repository.

Does this make sense? I’m not saying our students don’t need to now how to find the full text, or search for a known item, or even how to do more complicated things like identify keywords — I’m saying that for a lot of them (not all of them, but a lot of them) knowing those things won’t help because they have deeper gaps in understanding — gaps that will take more teaching to fill, not less. So we need to figure out what we’re okay shifting to a more collaborative platform to free up time for this work. I’m going to pick this idea up a little further in part 2.

Most of us are dissatisfied with one-shots, a lot of the time

We all spend a lot of time teaching skills-level stuff (how to navigate tools, understand academic information workflows, how to work around bad interfaces) and there are students who need those skills.

Many of my thoughts about one-shots come from some research Kate and I did a few years ago. We asked teaching librarians to share practice stories, coded and analyzed those stories and then did much more in-depth interviews with about 20 of librarians who shared them. I want to emphasize that pretty universally, these were not cynical, jaded or otherwise negatively-focused teaching librarians. They were passionate, committed, capable of drawing great joy from their work teaching librarians. We presented on this research at different steps along the way, and between those conversations and the data we gathered I am pretty sure that the conclusions we drew are likely and they both point to these issues.

Anyway, the overwhelming conclusion from both rounds of data was that the pieces of teaching librarianship that gave most people the most satisfaction were those things that happened outside of the boundaries of the one-shot. And because they were situations where librarians got to follow up, assess, give feedback — I don’t think the anonymous tutorial would fit the bill either. These were all situations where librarians got to engage with students about the process of research on a process level, even if it was just to see and share in the celebration of the final product of that research. Some of these situations started with a one-shot or two, but they extended beyond it.

some rights reserved by fouro (flickr)

On the other hand, situations where librarians felt powerless or frustrated, where they questioned their own impact, or felt otherwise Sisyphean usually focused on the one-shot. And it’s that wheels-spinning aspect of the stories that I wanted to focus on here. The one-shot conversations and stories were largely about the frustration inherent in teaching the same basic skills repeatedly, without the ability to find out see a broader impact on broader goals like critical thinking or lifelong learning.

I think we’ve all experienced classes where we planned for something broad and conceptual, but got bogged down in the details of finding full text or figuring out why the discovery layer keeps serving up broken links. Or workshops where we planed to wow a graduate class with Zotero and instead fell into a “what are databases” rabbit hole. Or, on the other side of things, we’ve had the classes where students got really interested in a meatier question, we had a great discussion but at the end of our 45 minutes, we knew that they still didn’t know how to find the full text (even if they didn’t know that yet).

We know that learning to navigate local systems is important, that many students need instruction in the skills, that some of our workflows are not intuitive and strange, and that some of our interfaces are super terrible and our users need workarounds. Some of our students have missed out on basic research instruction coming in, and that we also need to provide resources for the others who are just the opposite – the students who already “get” libraries and know they need to learn this one. I’m reminded of this every fall when I get the emails and go to the outreach events and talk to the students who just want to learn everything about their new environment.

So how to strike that balance – to provide the resources for students who want to get ahead, and for those who need to catch up before they’re left behind, while still saving ourselves the time, energy, and resources we need to do the other things we want to do?

Much of our assessment is basic and skills-based too, especially in our online tutorials and in our one-shot sessions.

I don’t have data on one-shot assessment at my fingertips, but I know that we all know there are significant, structural issues that come up when we try to assess those meaningfully. The most important of these issues is the fact that the only time that most of us can control our assessment is immediately after the session and that’s not a great time to do it. At best, we find out what they feel about their skills immediately after practicing them in the relatively safe and controlled atmosphere of the library classroom. What happens when they go out to do the actual research they need to do, is another ball game altogether.

Not a Conclusion, but the End of the Middle
So the issue here is that a lot of the things we do in library instruction wouldn’t tax the relatively limited scope of teaching that a MOOC is equipped to support. And that while a lot of the things we do are important, and necessary, they’re not all we think we should be doing.

Tomorrow, I’m going to broaden out a little bit and talk about context — why this is a time when we need to think about shifting what we do now to be able to do more.

I was remiss in suggesting that the content from Command-f might be gone – Caleb would not let that happen.

This post, however, is one that I have actually gone back to a number of times. Mostly because I am lazy and it was an easy way to get back to the journal article I was discussing.

But also because of all of the thinking and reading I’ve done over the years about anxiety and affect and how they play into the research process – in a pretty real way, that thinking started here.

Control Freaks

August 7, 2008 – 12:11 am by anne-marie

So I want to confess something about this paper I wrote in college.

See, I took this Constitutional Law class in the PoliSci department. We had to analyze a hypothetical Supreme Court case and write up a legal opinion just like we were Justices. For this class we used an actual law school Con Law casebook for our textbook – and most of the pieces of the hypothetical situation we were supposed to rule on in this paper we could argue from the cases included in the book. Most, but not all.

Students treated it as kind of a weed-out course for pre-law types. With a zillion law schools out there, it couldn’t actually weed anyone out but it was still all very Paper Chase. So there was some self-imposed pressure to do well on this paper to keep your dream of working 80 hour weeks to make partner alive.

So here’s my confession. I can totally think like a lawyer. I got an A- on that paper — but that’s not the confession part.

The confession part is that I wrote the whole thing without ever going to the library. My 20-page argument was entirely based on what I could get out of the casebook. And the reason I’m telling you about the A- is this: I totally, obviously, knew better. I knew that parts 1 and 3 were solid and that walking the four blocks to the law school was the only way I could possibly get what I needed to un-twist the tortured logic of part 2 and still, I wouldn’t go.

So what’s the point of this? The point is that I’ve been hearing a little flurry lately of “how do we get these kids, these kids today, to use all the awesome stuff we have for them” conversations and I’ve been thinking about how it’s all so very complicated. Way more complicated than “they want fast, they want easy, they’re Millennials dontcha know.” It’s about so much more than technology – it’s about the discourse, and the scope and query, and even about affect or emotion.

Which is what I want to talk about a little bit today – that affective, emotional piece. I think we librarians sometimes show a tendency to assume that our users actively don’t want to use the library, don’t want to talk to us, don’t want to use our stuff. If we’re in a bad mood, we might assume that they’re deliberately voting thumbs down on us. If we’re in a better mood, we thnk more that they just don’t know – don’t know what’s available, don’t know how to use it, don’t know why they should use it, don’t know how to recognize it.

I think it’s worth remembering that sometimes it’s not about us — not that that means there’s nothing we can, or should, do about it. At root, though, not about us.

There’s an article from a few months ago – in the Journal of Academic Librarianship* – looking at how some of these emotional, affective factors relate to how students perceive and use information sources. It considers how students feel about themselves and their problem-solving — how well they do it, if they like to do it. And even beyond that – how they understand their ability TO solve problems – if they feel in control of their feelings about it and their behaviors.

So, what did they find?

Confidence is key — confidence connects to users’ perceptions about the quality of information sources, how comprehensive, useful or even interesting they think the sources are. Basically, users who don’t feel confident in their own problem-solving abilities are more likely to perceive a source as boring, sketchy, or not useful. They are more likely to perceive a tool like a library catalog or database as useless than their peers with higher confidence levels do.

The researchers also examined how these students perceived their own willingness to engage in problem-solving in the first place This factor – the approach/avoidance style – turns out to relate to how accessible students perceive information sources to be. Users with high avoidance, who avoid problem-solving activities, perceive inforamtion sources as less accessible than their peers with low avoidance. Isn’t that interesting?

In other words, approaching this from the perspective of “how do we get them to use our stuff,” it’d be really easy to write these students off as the worst stereotype of millennials or net gens. After all, it’s true that these students probably don’t have great things to say about our stuff — if they lack confidence, they doubt journal articles and criticize library catalogs. If they are highly avoidant, then they think our stuff is really hard to get.

And they probably say so. If they talk to us at all, they probably tell us that the journal article is no good because it’s not about the pros AND the cons of gun control. They probably tell us that the database has nothing on their topic. But the interesting thing about this research is — that these affective characteristics apply to way more than just library stuff. On that emotional level, these students aren’t drawing a “library stuff bad/ internet stuff good” distinction.

Students who lack confidence are also more likely to be skeptical of web sources, and they are more likely to have problems with how search engines work. Highly avoidant students even characterize information from friends and family (friends and family!) as less accessible than their low-avoidance peers do. It’s about them, not us – except to the extent that understanding them will help us reach/teach them.

So that’s all fascinating to think about, but the factor I found the most interesting was the users’ perception their own control. This was the only factor that significantly affected how a student chose their sources. The more out of control a student feels, the more likely they are to choose sources based on how easy those sources are to use, or how familiar those sources are. “Accuracy” comes down below “easy” and “familiar” to these users.

Now this is a little bit about us, in that classic library anxiety way – if the environment is unfamliliar or intimidating (virtual or face to face) the user will tend to favor what they are familiar with before trying something new. But it’s a slightly different way of thinking about it – at least of thinking about the solution. Instead of thinking of ways to make the library friendlier, or the librarians more approachable or accessible, or the online interfaces more google-like and familiar, this way of thinking about the question suggests that we should be thinking of ways to put the users back in control. To let them define their own questions, their own stories and their own interactions.

But it goes beyond library anxiety as well, because a user can feel out of control of the situation, even when the do know what it is they need to do, and even how to do it. This is especially significant for students, I think, who ARE out of control when it comes to a lot of their information needs. They don’t have control over their tasks, their timelines or even their conditions for success.

And its not just students. Lots of people who come to us with information needs are out of control of something in their lives – they have problems, they need information – at that moment they are almost inherently out of control of something. The search for information is in itself a desire to assert some control over whatever that problem-solving situation is.

I have no idea if this research really applies to IM reference – which usually isn’t all that emotional – but I think there’s a good chance that it does. It seems logical to me that library users, feeling out of control and vulnerable because there is information they lack, would be attracted to a communication style that allows them to assert some control over how they get help? I find this just as plausible than the more common interpretation I hear, that they choose IM because they’re in a hurry and they have no time and they want someone to just give them the information they want.

Not that I would have IM’ed those librarians at the law library at Penn. I totally knew how to use the systems, and where the stuff I needed was in the building. But back in the 1980’s, there was a definite sense that the law school did not really want the undergraduates anywhere near their library. They had restricted hours, they had a we’re only letting you in at all because we have to attitude. And asserting some control over my own process, I decided not to deal with that. So yes, some of that emotional, affective response I had had something to do with the library.

But some did not. Some was about taking control of: my timeline, my scope, the amount of energy I spent and how I balanced that project with all the others. Some was about taking control of the project – I was most interested in part 3, and wanted to spend my time there. And on some level, it was taking control of the outcome – defining my own conditions for success.

Which is where these two studies, and these ideas, connect in my head. On the one hand, the idea that it’s not about me or about my library. That sometimes our users are dealing with a lot of stuff that has nothing directly to do with us – so there’s no need to take their frustration personally. On the other hand, that we can do some things to let our users control their stories, their questions, and their interactions with us and with our resources. And in so doing, alleviate some of those frustrations. Here I’m fuzzy on the details, yes. But I think we have been and will be talking about them around here.

**Dominic E. Madell and Steven J. Muncer (2007), Control over social interactions: An important reason for young people’s use of the Internet and mobile phones for communication, CyberPsychology and Behavior, 10:1, 137-140.

I try my best to keep up with Inside Higher Ed bloggers, but I don’t always succeed. Monday’s post from the Community College Dean jumped out at me (probably because of the title – The Ballad of the Red Pen) and then once it had jumped out at me, it got me thinking.

some rights reserved by Cellar Door Films (flickr)

So the post isn’t really about using the red pen so much as not using it.

(BTW, the only thing I clearly remember from the award winning one week of training I got before heading into the classroom as a graduate Teaching Assistant was this advice – Never Use a Red Pen.

The argument was that the red pen had become so stigmatized that just the sight of red ink could send students into panic mode. To this day, I use something else)

Anyway, at the heart of this post (according to me) lies the concept of “stretch errors.” These are those errors that happen when someone is trying to grow and develop — when they’re trying new things. The suggestion is that one should be “thoughtful” about using the red pen too much when the errors you see fall into that category – too much discouragement to a student taking a risk and trying something new = problems.

This got me thinking about information literacy and research instruction and what I was saying in the Good Library Assignments posts. If a big part of what we’re doing with college level research instruction is helping students grow, try new things, expand their repertoire — then we must be seeing “stretch errors,” right? I mean, unless we’re totally failing.

But I’m a little stuck on what those would look like in the research context? I have a whole stack of metathinking research narratives that I’m using for another project and I’m thinking I might go through them to see if anything comes to me.

(Please share if something came to you!)

As a starting point, it would probably be useful to think about where they’re likely to stretch. Choosing sources has to be one of those areas. It’s one the areas where we’re really pushing students to expand their toolbox, to try something new. There must be situations where students are trying to choose something scholarly, complex, expert and failing — but failing in a stretch error way, because they are trying something new.

Citing sources correctly is definitely something new, something they’ve not done before, but it’s hard for me to think about the formatting aspect of this as leading to stretch errors. The question of when and where to cite though, the question of paraphrasing and summarizing and using sources in ways other than Quote Then Cite — then yes, I think we may be seeing some there.

some rights reserved by marylouisemain (flickr)

In fact, the very first thing that came to mind when reading this post was the Citation Project and its discussion of patchwriting.

Patch writing kind of blew me away when I first read about it because it was one of those concepts that explained so much.

The piece that really grabbed me when I first read about patchwriting in what is (I think) the first Citation Project paper was the idea that this happens when students are trying to do the right thing. That they’re looking at the examples of academic writing we’re making them use – peer reviewed articles — and trying to mimic what they see. They don’t have the domain knowledge, the vocabulary, or the experience yet to write this way for themselves, so they end up veering too close to their original sources in an attempt to mimic that genre of writing. That just made so much sense to me, and now seems like a classic example of a stretch error.

So we left off with the idea that research is scary and difficult, that it’s much easier to follow a familiar path than to try something new. I think the last two truisms really get at the place where all three of those factors that students need to be research-brave converge: affect, skills and practicalities.

Students won’t automatically understand the connections between research assignments and course outcomes.

Part of this, I think, is because many students don’t come to college with the idea that research is something is a learning process – in their experience, it’s been more like a stringing together quotes process. But to really get the learning process idea, I think, you have to think about knowledge as something that is constructed, not discovered and you also have to think you have the capacity to construct it yourself. That’s a pretty advanced way of thinking about knowledge — it’s where we want them to get as they become information literate.

A lot of courses have objectives that fall into the “learn about X” category — if you think that “learning” means “find out the truth from an authority,” then it can be hard to see a research paper as a part of that. But even with smaller concepts – a lot of what we require for academic research writing can seem to be more of a hoop you jump through within the boundaries of a class, not something you’ll carry forward out of the academic environment.

Here’s an example. I do a guest bit in a class for beginner engineers every year (and every year I panic about it because I am not an engineer and every year it turns out to be delightful — you’d think I’d learn). This year, though, I had some legit reasons to panic because the faculty member asked me to spend 10 minutes or so teaching them about citations and plagiarism.

(She didn’t put that time limit on it, that was just the amount of time more than I had from last year — and she also didn’t mind when I spent more time on it — this isn’t a war story — just a note about where my head was).

So anyway, I had just read Project Information Literacy’s great report on the First Year Out data — explaining how new graduates face information problems in the workplace. I was very struck by their finding that a lot of new employees know that they were hired with an expectation that people their age are good at technology and that they therefore feel a they should be doing things quickly and online.

So to do this plagiarism thing, I broke the students into groups of 3 and had them do a think-trio-share thing. I told them to imagine that they were in an internship at a company they really wanted to work for. They’d just been given their first task — something like researching a new scheduling software tool for the team to use — and they were going to be expected to write a report in a week with a recommendation.

I asked them if they agreed with my assumption that their new boss would draw some conclusions about them from the results of this – the first major project they delivered — they agreed. So then, I asked them to think about how they’d like their new boss to describe them, based on their work on this project. I told them each to come up with 5 adjectives. And then in groups I asked them to come to consensus on 3 that they thought were really important. Then I asked them to do it again – but this time think of what they would like their new boss to know about their process – about how they approach a task. Then they came up and wrote their words on the board – if someone else had the same one, they wrote over it. Kind of a low-tech tag cloud.

Unfortunately, I am disorganized and did not take a photo. But the words were pretty great – a combination of: articulate, decisive, open-minded, out-of-the-box thinker, creative, comprehensive, critical, concise, thorough, efficient, resourceful, smart, intelligent and so on.

(“technology savvy” and “fast on the Internet” did not come up – which I do not think undercuts PIL’s finding at all — I think in the safe confines of the classroom, they didn’t think those things mattered – which is not the same thing at all as being in a job where you know you’re expected to be a technological whiz-kid)

So then we talked about how the sources they chose to consult would/could communicate these things about them as an employee, and about their work process. I said that’s a major reason we cite – to present a particular picture of ourselves. And then we shifted into a conversation about what types of sources would help them do this for the assignment they had in that class.

So how does this connect to anything? Well, one of the major outcomes of this particular class is that students will develop basic skills they need to work as a professional in the field of environmental engineering. Now, think about the plagiarism thing. The professor wasn’t asking me to talk about that as it connected to that outcome. Her main focus was good citations in her class projects, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that. But taught that way – then citations (and implicitly, the sources you choose) become just another hoop you have to navigate in school projects – that are totally disconnected from anything that might extend beyond.

A lot of our courses have an explicit connection to beyond — they’re intended to teach people to think and communicate like an historian, a rangeland ecologist, a soil scientist, an environmental engineer, and so on. And in libraries we think (I believe) that most of what we have to teach should support our students in what they do in the classroom and beyond. So, lay those connections bare, is what I’m saying.

(I was talking about this activity in a workshop for faculty in another context and one small group started talking about how they could take this premise for talking about citations and build on it – how they could bring in examples of professional writing that students could analyze to see what types of sources are used in the field – or to include that concept in questions to guest speakers.)

Research freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

One of our learning technology people told me years and years ago when we were chatting about teaching that he believes we shouldn’t force students to make too many choices to be successful — that if you want to give them freedom to choose a topic, then you should provide a lot of structure in terms of form – and so on. That’s kind of like a rule, but it has stuck with me.

See, I’m pretty good at interpreting assignments – actually, I’m pretty great at it. I didn’t stress out much when it came to predicting what teachers were really looking for, what would make them happy — I knew what they wanted to see. I actually enjoyed the unstructured “I can’t wait to see what you all come up with” types of assignments. But I realized in library school that I’m way in the minority there – that for others, these free for alls are incredibly stressful.

Here’s the thing – a lot of people who go into academia are pretty good at school. And a huge part of being good at school is knowing what’s really being asked for. I am guessing that a lot of professors probably loved getting to play with ideas and sources and concepts when they were students, and were good at it. And then we become professors and we want to design the exciting, enriching assignments we would have wanted as students. But in many cases we weren’t typical students – what we wanted wasn’t what everyone else wanted or needed?

I read an article years ago about the writing classroom where the teacher (I think she was a middle school teacher) asked the class to re-write a short story they’d just read from a different character’s perspective. I am pretty sure that I would have adored this assignment in the sixth grade — that’s just how my brain works. But the class pretty much crashed and burned. Instead of giving up on the assignment, or on them, she broke it down into a series of smaller exercises that helped the students re-frame the story, empathize with different characters and – and this is important – develop the confidence to create something themselves that was going to stand alongside (in their minds) the original story by a “real author.”

It is important to remember what a huge step it is to feel confident enough to say “no one else seems to be interpreting these facts this way, but this is what makes sense to me and I’m confident in my analysis and evidence.” Talk about unpacking – that’s a career’s worth of information literacy development embedded in that one sentence. And this brings us back to where we ended yesterday — that a huge part of what we do is give students the courage to take risks. Is it a good idea to ask them to do that in every stage of a multilayered project?

One concrete place where I really think this all comes together is the topic selection phase — a place were many students don’t get much guidance — and a place where many research projects fail. Not only do the affective dimensions loom really large at this stage, but topic selection is also a skill (that requires domain knowledge). And at the same time, there’s a hefty dose of practicality in play — you’re going to be judged by someone else, that means figuring out their rules.

For this, I’m going to turn to Project Information Literacy again – their 2010 paper on how students use information in the digital age has a great section on barriers students face and for many of those students (like, easily most) the biggest barrier is “getting started.” The finding here is that students approach topic selection extremely aware of the fact that they are navigating a host of unstated expectations on the part of their teacher — not just in terms of “that’s interesting” (or not) but from a much deeper and more complex level — “that’s a topic that will (or won’t) let you do the kind of analysis and use the kinds of sources I expect to see here.” It says they think of this as a gamble:

Instead, for many students we interviewed, course-related research was difficult because it was more akin to gambling than completing college-level work. Yes, gambling. The beginning of research is when the first bets were placed. Choosing a topic is fraught with risk for many students. As one student acknowledged in interviews: either a topic worked well or it failed when it was too late to change it.

In the last couple of terms a colleague and I have been experimenting with the information literacy models in our FYC class to see if we can’t improve them. We started out looking at delivery platforms, but something we saw during our assessment that term led us down the rabbit hole of curiosity and getting started. So this last term, we took five sections and built in a set of activities where they browsed for topics. Their course instructors sent them to ScienceDaily, and then led them through a process of topic selection. I wouldn’t say this was uncritically successful — there are things we want to tweak – but successful it definitely was. But one of the most striking things about the process was actually the conversations we had with the instructors before where they confirmed, from their experience, that yes – topic selection is super scary and stressful for students and for some, it’s a barrier they can’t overcome.

I think activities and assignments that focus entirely on that crucial first step — what kinds of questions do people ask in this field – would be fantastic. But if you want to do a more fully-fledged research project in a class, then building in activities that provide structure, feedback and hopefully spark interest during the topic-selection stage are crucial. Browsing is a great way to get started with this — structured, guided, useful browsing that will expose students to sources and ideas they haven’t seen before. This is a map that some colleagues and I created for a workshop – we wanted a visual that would help students start to understand the scope and extent of research happening on our campus. We started the workshop with a browsing activity – and I think a lot of students would have stayed there the whole time if we’d let them.

Conclusion

I wouldn’t say I have any strong, definitive conclusions here — the closest thing to a big-c Conclusion is I think the idea that helping students take risks is what we need to do — and that our assignments should be authentic enough to make them take those cognitive or affective risks, but structured enough to give them what they need to be successful in their risk-taking.

But the workshop this was in service of happened, and the conversations were great. And I just checked back on my three strains of thought and while they may not have fully cohered — they’re all here in some way. So I’m calling this a win. Thanks for coming along with me.

So if bad assignments are not better than nothing – what makes them good? Not what are the rules of good assignments, because tired of rules, but yes, there are some principles, or maxims or truisms that come to mind.

I bet these aren’t all of them either, but they are the ones I’ve synthesized from my thinking:

Saying “use the library” doesn’t make the library useful.

The best way to encourage students to use a research tool or collection is to design a task that is legitimately easier when one uses that tool.

The library is not a shortcut. People who use the library can’t end-run thinking or evaluating.

Requiring something is not the same as teaching it.

Students won’t automatically understand the connections between research assignments and course outcomes.

Research freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Right now, I’m thinking about the first four. In fact, I would say the things on this list are a little bit apples and oranges. The first two are obviously coming from those assignments that throw in a “use the library” requirement, or a “use peer reviewed sources” requirement, or a “you must use print journal articles” requirements or even a “you must use ERIC” requirement.

(Though that print articles thing is getting a little long in the tooth. I know, I know, it still happens but not like it used to)

The next two are getting at some reasons why I think that faculty add those requirements.

So let’s dig in a little more and think about how these themes mesh with what we know about how students use information, go about research, and approach assignments.

Saying “use the library” doesn’t make the library useful.

The best way to encourage students to use a research tool or collection is to design a task that is legitimately easier when one uses that tool.

As I said, these are mostly about requirements within assignments, and I think the more interesting place to examine them is in the reasons why. But I also think that these cover those — “I just want them to go to the library and touch the books” assignments. And here’s the thing – those assignments don’t work either.

A couple of years ago, I spent a lot of time reading about library anxiety, which is a topic that I find resonates well with faculty audiences. At least a little of this is because of the Library Anxiety Scale – because that scale has been tested and validated and used in many circumstances it means when I say “we know” it gives me a familiar type of expertise — we know, because in my field, we have done this research.

The two features of library anxiety that I tend to emphasize are these:

It’s situational – like white coat hypertension – it only kicks in in certain situations. And those situations? When students actually need to use the library to complete a task or solve a problem. On my campus, everyone studies in the library (no, not really, but we’re packed most of the time). But the way library anxiety works means that a student could come to the library every single night, could have “their” own chair, or carrel or study room and still, as soon as they actually had to use the library to write a research paper, destructive anxiety could kick in.

It’s characterized by a sense of “I should know this” – accompanied by a sense of “everyone else does know this.”

Given these realities, it’s pretty easy to see why an assignment that is designed to get students into the library to touch the resources isn’t going to help. And if it’s an ill-designed assignment, where they’re not going to find the thing they need to touch – then it’s going to do damage.

And even if we have the stuff, if the assignment is written in such a way that it assumes students have had experiences with information that they have not had (reading paper newspapers), or that they know things they don’t know (research is published in things called journals) — it will make things worse.

The library is not a shortcut. People who use the library can’t end-run thinking or evaluating.

I was working on a book chapter earlier this year – a textbook chapter for composition students. And one of the things that the editor and I had a lot of back and forth about was just this. She was bringing me information from the composition faculty who had reviewed the book about how they wanted this to be simpler, or that to be simpler.

And I would say back, yes I know that they would like X, where X = whatever shortcut we were talking about here: evaluation checklists, peer-reviewed journals ticky boxes, callout boxes explaining why library databases were better — I get these requests too.

I get why people want shortcuts. I really do. Especially in composition where the topics come from across several disciplines and you’re dealing with a whole bunch of discourses that you have no particular experience with — teaching how to find, recognize, use and choose information sources is really hard. I get why they don’t want to fall down the rabbit holes I fall down into when I try to teach “what is peer review and why should you care” quickly and efficiently. But still, at the end of the day, suggesting that there are shortcuts around thinking, evaluating and choosing don’t do students any favors.

I have a couple of short slideshows I use when I want to “show” people how difficult it is to navigate our information landscape as a student.

One shows the first page of four different articles. I lead off this one with the question: “which articles were peer-reviewed.”

One shows five screenshots of newspaper websites. For this one, the question is “what type of source is this.”

Both of those exercises are designed to illustrate how much we (faculty) already know about information and publishing and how we use that knowledge to make these calls — we’re bringing tacit knowledge to the table that many of our students don’t have.

The last one is a little different. It pulls out a set of sources easily found in library databases — it includes a partisan blog, a news aggregator, a newsletter, a small newspaper and some others. This one is designed to illustrate the no-shortcuts piece.

When I hear faculty complain that “my students just went to Google” I actually wonder how often their students ACTUALLY went straight to the library databases they were told to use? Given that they can easily find Google-like sources using Summon (and Lexis-Nexis, and Academic Search Premier, and so on) it has to be that some of these maligned students actually did use the library. The issue isn’t that they went to Google instead of the library – the issue is that they didn’t know what to do with what they found – and that’s an issue in both contexts.

Requiring something isn’t the same as teaching it

It would be great if we could just require what we wanted and know that students would be able go out and figure out what we meant, what we wanted, how to deliver it — and find the whole process enriching and interesting enough to carry into the future. We all know that’s not realistic.

When it comes to research, though what needs to be taught, and how much time and effort it takes to teach it can come as a surprise. I’ve linked this old post from Dr. Crazy’s excellent blog here more than once – but I think it does such a great job of communicating just how deep the rabbit holes go when you start teaching students about research and information. There are so many unwritten rules that define good practice in academic communication, and so many things we can easily assume are common knowledge — once you start unpacking those things for students, though, you can quickly find yourself lost in a web of “but to understand that, you need to know this — a full day just to teach MLA style? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Library anxiety is one reason why there’s a problem when we don’t unpack the requirements in our assignments, but it’s not the only one. This one looms especially large in those “bad assignments” that are categorized by mis-matches — between the requirements and the students’ ability levels or between the requirements and the point of the assignments themselves.

I’ve talked about student development before, at length, and I won’t do so here but tl:dr – students don’t come to college thinking about knowledge and knowledge creation the same way their teachers do. They’re not supposed to – they’re supposed to develop that way while they’re here. So when we require sources that have one set of epistemological assumptions embedded within them (like peer-reviewed articles) and we don’t unpack those assumptions, then students will try and fit the new sources into their current way(s) of knowing. When the sources don’t fit (as they inherently won’t) then they think the sources are just a series of hoops they have to navigate to make teachers happy.

If you, like me, think there’s value in the work scholars do, this should be worrying.

The thing is, unpacking those assumptions is a huge job — let’s look at the “you must use a peer reviewed article” requirement. This rabbit hole will take you almost all the way to China. To really understand and use these articles you need to know:

Scholars do research. Not “research paper” research but other types of original research.

Scholars frequently write articles about individual studies, which examine specific things – not every dimension of a topic.

Research is usually (but not always) reported in things called journals.

Scholars argue, but in a particular way. They aren’t necessarily trying to win (and end) a conversation when they argue — there’s always another question and that’s not a flaw.

The same scholars who write the articles in journals also review other people’s articles for quality.

When scholars review for quality they don’t repeat the experiment to see if it’s true.

Scholars continue examining and evaluating the quality of an article after its published.

Scholars belong to professional communities called disciplines.

Disciplines develop rules or best practices about conducting and reporting on research.They’re not all the same.

That’s a huge amount to unpack and you can’t really expect students to “get it” if you just mention it it once (even if you do so at length). And it doesn’t even get at the fact that most students don’t have the domain knowledge to read these articles critically.

So a huge part of “good library assignments” if figuring out what you, as the teacher, actually have the capacity to support. Can you devote a full day to teaching MLA citations? Can you spend a week on scholarly knowledge creation?

And there’s still another level to “teaching it” that’s equally important, and just as labor-intensive: feedback. Students need feedback on the choices they make when it comes to information sources and their research process. And they need the opportunity to apply that feedback and try again. Some colleagues and I did a small research-process study last summer (soon to be published in portal, if you’re interested) and our students reported that they rarely get feedback on the sources they choose. And this finding wasn’t a surprise.

Students know how to do school. It’s not hard for them to figure out what really matters — when teachers don’t invest time on the front end explaining a requirement, and don’t give meaningful feedback on the result – they’re quickly going to realize that they don’t need to put any real effort into meeting that requirement. That’s why we hear “as long as you put the web sources fourth or fifth in the bibliography, and the EBSCO sources on top you’ll be fine.”

It’s almost like teachers and students have silently agreed that library databases are going to be shorthand for quality. As long as students go through the motions of using them, then we’ll consider that requirement checked off and focus on other things.

But it doesn’t help them when they actually need information to solve problems or make decisions, and it doesn’t do us any good if they ultimately decide the work that scholars do and that librarians preserve, repackage and make useful is useless.

I was talking to a faculty member who teaches a class for first-years called science myth busters – and told me about an approach he uses that I think has a lot of potential across a lot of disciplines. He spends a full day teaching about the concepts of correlation and causation before he has students read research articles (and news reports about research). Then, when they read the articles, they analyze them — just on that concept. They consider how the news reporters understand it, and how the scholars talk about it.

What I love about this is that it gives the students a structure they can use to start to approach these sources like someone engaged in knowledge creation would — it gives them language they can use, and a concrete task to complete. It’s manageable for the instructor, and it’s meaningful for the student. And many fields or areas of study have key concepts that could be used in a similar way.

See, Project Information Literacy (and about a million other studies) tell us that students tend to stick with what they know. Once they have a research-process hammer, then they’ll try and turn every research problem into a nail. They’ll stick with the same type of sources, with the same research tool, with the same processes and methods. They port them from high school and will only adapt them as they need to.

I think a huge part of what we’re (the big we – the higher ed we) are about is getting them to expand beyond what they’ve done before- to consider different types of evidence, more complex processes and to build a bigger toolbox. But trying something new is scary. Feelings matter – and we have to create an environment that makes them feel they can do it. Skills matter – we have to give them the tools to do it. And practicalities matter – it has to be worth their while to do it too.

There will be one more part – hopefully tomorrow — but I’m heading out for some Oregon Shakespeare Festival in a few hours so it might be Monday.

I’m putting together a workshop tomorrow for teaching librarians about good research assignments — so I went looking to see what else has been written on the topic. I found lots of good stuff (I’ll talk about that later) but mostly what I found were rules — do’s and don’ts — embedded into pages about “when to ask for library instruction.”

(I bet you can predict what the rules are).

But here’s the thing – I break the rules all the time. In the last five years I have:

Taught classes without the faculty member present!

Said. “okay, sure!” when I was asked for a scavenger hunt activity.

Scheduled workshops for classes that don’t have research assignments, and which aren’t going to have research assignments.

And in one memorable case – integrated a scavenger hunt into a workshop for a class that was in the library without their instructor, that was a third again too big for every student to have an hands-on computer AND that didn’t have any kind of research assignment.

I mean, I don’t break rules for the thrill of breaking rules. And it’s not like we have anything so structured as “rules” here anyway. But I know them, just like we all know them, which means that even though I had good reasons for doing all of those things, I felt I had to figure those reasons out and justify those choices.

But I realized this morning that … I’m tired of rules. Or, maybe it’s more that rules make me tired. The effort to control and regulate a bunch of external conditions to make the one-shot — which has a bunch of moving parts that are uncontrollable — work is really tiring.

(And the rules have a nasty little unstated flip side — the one that says if all of the rules are followed, then the only reason why the one-shot isn’t awesome is librarian failure. That exhausts me even more.)

So in thinking about “good library assignments” the last thing I feel like doing is coming up with more rules. That’s right, not even “no scavenger hunts.”

I’m trying to pull together 3 pieces of interconnected thinking here. I don’t think I’ll talk about them all today – but I am hoping they’ll cohere if I talk about them. Here they are:

War stories: Thinking over “bad library assignments” I have seen – what are the broader categories?

Assignments that require students to use, locate or manipulate a thing that my library does not have.

Assignments that require students to do a thing in an outdated or inefficient way.

Assignments with no immediate payoff – that serve only an unknown future need.

I’m going to dig into this more tomorrow, I think but for now – what do these things have to do with the rules above?

The faculty member present thing – probably nothing. I agree that an active, involved faculty member makes my sessions better. But I also have a lot of faculty at this point I’ve been working with for a long time — if someone I’ve assignment-designed with, taught with and published with needs to go to a conference the same week that her students need the library, I’m going to say yes.

But the rest – the rest do relate. Because basically, I don’t think that a thrown-together research assignment, a mediocre research assignment, or a research assignment that’s separate from the class and will never be talked about again is going to make my session better.

And when we’re thinking beyond my individual session — then, a bad research assignment is going to make things worse. So at that point, I have a couple of options – do the session without one (which I’ve done) or say, “no thanks, not this term” (which I’ve also done).

Why do I think they make things worse? Because there are implicit messages buried in each of those “bad assignment” characteristics — let’s revisit?

Assignments that require students to use, locate or manipulate a thing to be successful — and my library does not have that thing (or enough of that thing).

Subtext: Libraries don’t have what you need. And perhaps even worse – librarians don’t know what you need and cannot help you.

Assignments that require students to do a thing in an outdated or inefficient way.

Subtext: People who use libraries do so because they don’t know the best way to do things.

Or, as a colleague and I used to say “let’s teach them – whatever you do, DON’T use library resources!” This actually came from an assignment that never happened. We wanted students to get an overview of the topic before going to scholarly sources (as you do) and we thought we might be able to embed a discussion about the differences between traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia in the unit (yeah, yeah, it was 2005. It was how we thought then).

We opened up our online Encyclopedia Brittanica, took a stack of student research logs, and started plugging in the words and phrases that they’d used in their initial searches. And OMG were the results ever terrible. We compared twenty-five student searches (because rigor) but we knew after five that we were never going to send people to the Brittanica because we’d be sending the implicit message – “whatever you do, DON’T use library resources.”

Assignments with no immediate payoff – that serve only an unknown future need.

Subtext:

Mis-matches — between assignment requirements and students’ cognitive development. Mis-matches — between the assignment requirements and the audience/ rhetorical purpose of the assignment.

These are two different things, but the subtext I’m worried about is the same: You have to use these sources, processes, and tools here in school, but once you graduate you’ll never use them again.